Radioactive Waste on Track to Be Moved

[jpak]

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/bw-other/2005/sep/14/091403452.html

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Energy Department cleared the way Wednesday for almost 12 million tons of radioactive waste to be moved from the banks of the Colorado River, which provides drinking water for more than 25 million people across the West.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman announced that a record of decision had been signed, formalizing the government's plan, which had been announced earlier this year.

The 94-foot-tall pile of uranium tailings - radioactive material leftover from uranium mining - is located three miles northwest of the city of Moab in Grand County, Utah. The tailings will be moved, predominantly by rail, to the proposed Crescent Junction, Utah, site, more than 30 miles from the Colorado River.

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Moab's rich uranium deposits were mined in the 1950s for nuclear bombs. The Uranium Reduction Co. sold its mill in 1962 to Atlas Corp., which ran it sporadically until declaring bankruptcy in 1998. The Energy Department took over the site in 2001. The Moab Project Site covers about 400 acres and includes a 130-acre uranium mill tailings pile that occupies much of the western portion.

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[hunter]

1. Here's the satellite picture....

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=moab+utah&ll=38.600639,-109.596605&spn=0.048749,0.081050&t=k&hl=en

Somebody is going to make a lot of money moving this big pile of dirt. I suspect they must have friends in the Bush Administration, otherwise it wouldn't happen.

[NNadir]

2. And the huge pile of dead bodies will be moved where.

This is a great deal for the moving company but it will save, let's see, how many lives. Oh yeah zero.

Why? Because this "huge" pile of "millions of tons" of "radioactive waste" has actually threatened zero people.

These are by the way, rocks from ore.

Even though we are told by the illiterate newspaper reporter that this "threatens" the water supply of 25 million people, this information should be regarded as coming from people who hide under the table because it once held a microscopic sample of uranium.

Now I'll dispense with the game of shovelling rocks around to help Halliburton and friends happily address the need to scam radiation paranoids for big bucks and give you an idea of how absurd these "25 million threatened" calculations actually are:

"For purposes of this analysis, two types of failures were evaluated even though highly unlikely: catastrophic and long-term. A catastrophic failure could occur during a major flood or a seismic
event. A long-term, slow release would be possible for events such as river migration, basin settling, or intermittent erosion of the cell cover. Long-term failures assume smaller-quantity releases over an extended period (many years); a continuation of this type of release would also require a failure of long-term management (this assumes that no repairs to the damaged cell would be done). This type of release, which is possible at all UMTRCA Title I sites, can be mitigated. DOE’s newly created (2003) Office of Legacy Management is responsible for monitoring and mitigating this type of release. The hypothetical catastrophic failure could release a large quantity of tailings into a relatively small volume of water compared to long-term releases, which would release a small quantity of tailings into a large volume of water (river flow over many years). Consequently, the assumptions associated with the hypothetical catastrophic event would yield the worst-case situation (more tailings released and higher contaminant concentrations in water). Risks to humans would be based on some type of activity that would bring people in contact with contamination. In this case, the contamination currently in the tailings pile was assumed to be dispersed downstream during an event such as a flood, and it was assumed that people would come in contact with this contamination in the water or sediments. Exposure of humans to the contamination would depend on what people were doing in the contaminated area. Examples could include building a house and living in this area, camping, or river rafting. These events result in differing time periods that people could spend in contaminated areas and differing activities that could cause someone to be exposed to the contamination (e.g., drinking contaminated water, breathing contaminated air). Risks increase with increasing time and exposure to contamination. Situations where people were exposed to contaminated media (soil, sediments, water, air) for a long period (many hours per day for many years) would yield the
highest risks for the same level of contamination in the contaminated media. Other activities such as camping in a contaminated area would yield lower risks because exposure to
contamination would occur for a limited number of days per year.
Two types of scenarios were analyzed. First, it was assumed that someone would build a house on contaminated sediments released from the tailings pile at a location downstream of the pile
(residential scenario). This scenario assumes a home would be built in a contaminated area and the contaminated water (in this case, contaminated surface water) would be used as the primary
drinking water source for many years (in reality, the contaminant concentrations in water would only last on the order of days; therefore, the exposures to contaminated water under a residential
scenario are unrealistically high but provide an upper bound to the potential risks). The most significant risks would occur from ingestion of contaminated drinking water and exposure to the
radon in air originating from radium-226. This assumes that a flood deposited contaminated sediments in an area where it was feasible to construct a house (e.g., outside the 100-year floodplain)."



Yada, yada, yada, yada.

http://www.eh.doe.gov/nepa/eis/eis0355/volume1/chapter4.pdf

Now I am personally aware of a radiation paranoid who is afraid of microscopic samples prepared with uranium and wants a medal for (allegedly) having handled one. (People often use microgram quantities of heavy elements - including (gasp, fear, fear, fear scare horror terrrrrrrrror) uranium to provide for electron diffraction in electron microscopes).

But the link above gives some scale of the problem, which is dwarfed by a typical normal single days normal operation of a single coal fired power plant, not that we could ever get weak minded radiation paranoids to give a shit about what comes out of coal mines, what leaches out of them, and one is aerosolized every damn day when their products are burned.

I love this link and repeat it frequently:

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html



And what might be the actual "threat" to drinking water in an imagined catastrophic failure of this terrible tailings pile: 0.006 mg to 0.012 mg/liter of uranium at Lake Powell, a few millionths of a gram. This is much lower than the concentration stipulated in 40 CFR parts 9 141 and 142, which is 30 micrograms/liter. Why did CFR set this level. To do otherwise would have required to shut down most of the nation's water supply, since uranium (gasp, fear, fear, fear scare horror terrrrrrrrror) is a constituent of granite, a rock through which the vast majority of the world's drinking water percolates.

Big threat. Let me jump under the table and get plastered! A cosmic ray might hit me in the head!

http://www.epa.gov/safewater/rads/radfr.pdf

The result from radiation paranoids is always the same: More opportunity for fraud, graft and waste to address a non-existent threat.

[jpak]

3. Thanks for that informative and eloquent post!!!!!

There is no threat to human health from uranium or radiation.

Nope nope nope

and low doses are even good for you!!

:rofl:

Lyndon would be proud...